Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) Sanjit Biswas (Samsara) - Making a Real-World Impact
Nov 5, 2025
Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Samsara and a former co-founder of Meraki, shares his journey of transforming physical operations through IoT. He discusses the pivotal moments that led him from academic projects like RoofNet to building successful companies. Sanjit emphasizes the importance of problem selection, team dynamics, and customer feedback in entrepreneurship. He also highlights how Samsara addresses inefficiencies in logistics and infrastructure, aiming for data-driven sustainability and scalability across various industries.
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From RoofNet To Meraki
- Sanjit and co-founder John built MIT RoofNet as a grad-school project to cover Cambridge with free Wi-Fi and use it as a research testbed.
- A Google talk led to a 2,000-unit preorder that forced them to commercialize and eventually start Meraki.
Bootstrapping With Customer Orders
- With a patched-together team of grad students they bootstrapped Meraki, pre-selling units to nonprofits and small deployments to meet MOQ manufacturing runs.
- The experiment sold about $1M in the first year and attracted Sequoia for Series A funding.
Beginner's Mind Sparks New Ventures
- After Meraki's exit to Cisco, Sanjit felt energized and intentionally hit reset to find the next meaningful problem to solve.
- He used ‘beginner's mind’ to explore infrastructure areas like energy and logistics before founding Samsara.
